DENVER – The Mavericks found out Friday that you can only tempt fate so many times before the odds catch up with you.

For the fifth time in five games, they fell into a first-quarter hole. In the last three contests, they were able to dig out of it and win.

Not this time. They couldn’t run down the Denver Nuggets, who got a superb overall game from reigning MVP Nikola Jokic and balanced scoring throughout the lineup to inflict a 106-75 thrashing on the Mavericks at Ball Arena.

The Mavericks trailed 20-9 early, 54-37 late in the second quarter and by 30-something in the fourth quarter.

“When you have games like this, no matter how you look at it, it’s just bad,” coach Jason Kidd said. “There’s no excuses. We should have been better and we weren’t.”

The faulty starts have been bothersome to everybody on the Mavericks’ bench. Falling behind by 20 points two games in a row is a bad trend, and the Mavericks know they have to fix it.

They overcame it against a bottom-dwelling San Antonio team on Thursday. But the Nuggets are a different animal, one with legitimate championship aspirations.

“It was a slow start,” Kidd said, “They were the better team tonight. But the slow starts are an issue. We talked about it earlier. And we’re hoping at some point it turns. We can talk about it, but we have to work at it and execute and tonight we didn’t do that for 48 minutes.”

Always fighting from behind is a tough way to make a living in the NBA, as the Mavericks found Friday. By the middle of the third quarter, they were down by 25 points. And on the second night of a back-to-back in the mile-high air of Denver, comebacks of that proportion are few and far between.

And so, they slipped to 3-2, falling to 1-2 on the road. The Mavericks played without Kristaps Porzingis for the second game in a row. Kidd said before the game that the lower back tightness that has sidelined him is improving and that the hope is that he can play Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Nuggets got 11 points, 16 rebounds and eight assists from Jokic. And they weren’t even sure he was going to play before the game. He had been suffering from a right knee contusion. But the reigning MVP seemed to be his typical self throughout.

Not so for Luka Dončić, who had 16 points but was just 5-of-18 from the field. Through five games, the superstar point guard is shooting 43-of-103 overall and 19-of-35 from 3-point range.

Believe it or not, that 3-point shooting is an improvement on last season, when he was 5-of-31 through the first five games.

“It’s just the start of the season,” Dončić said. “It was the same last year or even worse. I just got to keep trusting my shot. I had a long summer, so I think the shots are going to (start to) fall.”

Said Kidd: “He’s missing shots that he normally makes. And that’s not just him, but everybody. Everybody’s getting good looks. They’re just not dropping. But we have to get better at that.

“That’s just the nature of this game, makes and misses. If you think you’re going to make every shot, you’re lying to yourself. So we have to get better at that. It crept into our game tonight that we weren’t making shots and we got frustrated. We can’t get frustrated. We have to continue to keep playing.”

None of that will change what happened Friday, which could be written off as a loss that was going to be hard to avoid given the circumstances of the back-to-back. But it still isn’t something the Mavericks can completely wipe away from their memory banks.

“It’s a little bit of both,” Dončić said. “It started with me. I got to be way better. That game is on me. But I think a little bit of both. You try to forget about it as soon as possible, but at the same time, you got to learn from it.”

And, while excuses are never a good thing, the altitude is something that a player notices, particularly one like Dončić, who is coming off a long summer with not many restful breaks.

“Yeah, yeah, especially back-to-back,” he said of noticing the altitude difference in the mile-high city. “It’s always in the first quarter when I most feel it. Today, I felt it. Even the referee said to me (about it).”

Twitter: @ESefko

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